Nothing breeds success like success, goes the saying.

Failure and its lessons are a terrific way to gain some success. Success has its lessons as well, but they are harder to learn because, well, we are too busy basking in the glow of success.

When you fail, the first thing you intuitively ask is, “What went wrong?” When you succeed, the first thing that comes to mind is, “I was right, and I can do it again”

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano point to three barriers to learning — all of which are associated with success.

1. Fundamental attribution errors:  When we succeed, we attribute it to our own skills and current strategy. Sometimes, however, we’re just plain lucky.
2. Overconfidence bias. Once thing success does breed is self-confidence. Good stuff, that, but too much of it gives us overconfidence that our next effort will be jus as successful.
3. Failure-to-ask-why syndrome. We tend to investigate why things go wrong, but not why they go right. “When executives and their teams suffer from this syndrome,” write  Gino and Pisano, “they don’t ask the tough questions that would help them expand their knowledge or alter their assumptions about how the world works.”

To remedy these tendencies, leaders need to think counter-intuitively. “Managers must actively test their theories, even when they seem to be working, and rigorously investigate the causes of both good and bad performance,” according to the researchers. “Ironically, casting a critical eye on your success can better prepare you to avoid failure. Some may consider this to be an art, but in fact it is much more of a science.”